### **Unthink** — Chapter 5: The Visible Problem

Touma woke to find Mio standing in the corner.

Not her voice. Not the familiar pressure of someone being present where no one else could see. Not a private comment arriving before he had quite finished having the thought that deserved it.

Mio. In the corner. Looking around the room as though she suspected it of concealing teeth.

He stared.

The ceiling above her was a suspicious beige. The lamp beside the futon was still broken. Dust, instant coffee, and cheap disinfectant still made up the room’s entire contribution to the idea of hospitality.

Nothing else had changed.

That seemed unreasonable.

“You’re there,” he said.

Mio looked at him. “I was there yesterday.”

“Not like that.”

“Try to make it sound less accusatory.”

He pulled the blanket higher, then immediately regretted doing it. The movement suggested there was something to be embarrassed about, which made him aware of everything there might be to be embarrassed about.

His face grew hot.

Mio folded her arms.

“Stop staring.”

“I’m checking something.”

“What?”

“Whether you disappear when I blink.”

“And?”

He blinked.

She waited, visibly offended.

“No.”

“Excellent work.”

It was a rude way to wake up.

Until now, the room had been a place where he could be privately wrong. Whatever else was happening to him, he could at least shut a door between it and the world. Mio could speak, and he could answer, and from outside it would look like one person making a poor adjustment to stress.

Now the wrongness was standing on the carpet.

A clerical error large enough to become visible.

The safe layer between the strange thing and the rest of the world had gone missing.

He reached down to straighten the blanket.

His hand passed through her knee.

For an instant he could not make sense of what he had seen. His fingers had gone where her leg was, and there had been nothing to stop them.

Mio drew back.

“Warn me before you do that.”

He snatched his hand away. “I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

He sat very still.

She was looking at the place his hand had passed through, her arms no longer folded. For a moment she seemed unable to decide where to put them.

“Can you feel anything?” he asked.

Her eyes returned to his face.

“Physically or emotionally?”

“I meant—”

“Yes. I could tell.”

“Could you stop acting like a person who understands me too well?”

“That was always the case.”

Before, he would have heard the pause that followed. Now he could see it.

Her shoulders tightened slightly. She drew a breath before she answered, though he had no idea whether she needed to. When she shifted her weight, something about the movement arrived late—not enough to look like a stumble, only enough to make him feel that the thought had asked the room for permission before becoming motion.

He looked away.

That was worse, somehow, than looking.

Bits of the procedure began returning to him. Instructions. Warnings. The effort of trying to remember which part he was supposed to be afraid of. It came back in pieces, like a bad signal carrying passwords that changed before he could use them.

None of it had prepared him for her standing beside his bed.

She seemed more alive than she had when she was only a voice.

He disliked the thought as soon as he had it. It implied she had been less alive before, and he did not know that. What had changed was what he could no longer avoid noticing.

The small hesitation before she moved.

The way she checked the door.

The care with which she held herself still.

He could see her fear now.

That made his own harder to organize.

He got up, taking more care than necessary to keep his hands to himself, and began pacing the narrow strip between the futon and the kitchenette counter.

There was barely enough floor for it. Three steps, turn, three steps back. The carpet dragged faintly at his socks.

Mio watched him.

He turned toward the counter and found himself glancing back at her. Turned toward the futon and did it again.

His body kept treating her as the center of the room.

It was not a tactical problem. He was not checking a threat or keeping track of an exit. He simply could not move without accounting for where she stood, where she was looking, whether his next step would bring him too close.

Being watched by her had become physical.

“Could you stop doing that?” she asked.

“Doing what?”

“Looking to see whether I’m still here.”

“I’m trying.”

“You’re not very good at it.”

He stopped beside the counter. There was an instant-coffee stain near his hand. He concentrated on it with an intensity it had done nothing to deserve.

The door opened.

Nico appeared in the doorway and stopped.

His eyes went to Touma, then Mio, then back to Touma. A little too deliberately.

“You’re both awake.”

Touma looked at him.

“You knew she could do that?”

“No.”

The answer came too quickly.

Nico seemed to hear it too. He adjusted his grip on the door.

“Not like this.”

“That sounds like a different answer.”

“It’s a more precise answer.”

Mio tilted her head. “He’s working very hard on those.”

Nico looked at her again.

There it was: the tiny interruption in his expression, the effort required to continue after she spoke. Whatever calm he had brought with him had apparently been prepared for a problem that did not look back.

“This is the first time we’ve had to deal with it outside a closed system,” he said.

“With what?” Touma asked.

Nico’s gaze shifted toward Mio.

“The part that talks back,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to phrase it that way.”

“But you’d already arranged the sentence.”

Touma glanced from her to Nico.

Nico was still in the doorway.

The visibility rule came back to Touma in a cold, inconvenient piece. Whatever else had changed, that rule still mattered. Nico standing there was not just someone entering a room. He was another witness, at another distance, with the open doorway behind him.

The room felt less private with every second.

“Is the limiter holding?” Touma asked.

“For the moment.”

“And this?”

“The projection isn’t stable.”

Touma looked at Mio.

“Projection.”

Nico’s mouth tightened. “It’s a technical term.”

“It sounds like something you give at school.”

“It’s not a school presentation.”

“No,” Mio said. “Usually those don’t object to the terminology.”

“I’m trying to be precise.”

“Then don’t call me a side effect.”

Nico went still.

Touma had not heard him say it. Perhaps he had not needed to.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

Then Nico said, carefully, “I’m trying to keep us alive.”

Mio looked at him. “Then we’re on the same side.”

Touma rubbed his face.

“She takes the side where we continue existing. Can we work with that?”

Nico let out a breath that did not quite become a sigh.

“Yes.”

It should have helped.

Instead, Nico looked past Mio, toward the room’s corners, and Touma felt the shape of the next problem before he heard it.

“If she’s registering outside the closed system,” Nico said, “we have to consider what else might register her.”

Touma lowered his hand.

“What else?”

“Cameras. Biometrics. Active recognition filters.”

Mio’s eyes moved toward the door.

“People?” Touma asked.

“Possibly. We don’t know how widely this carries.”

The list rearranged the room.

A moment ago, Touma had been embarrassed because Mio could watch him wake up. Now there were lenses to think about. Sensors. Systems that might notice something impossible and send it somewhere else to be examined.

The door was open. Beyond it was a world that did not need to understand what it saw before making a record of it.

“How bad is that?” he asked.

Nico looked at Mio, then back at him.

“Bad enough for you?”